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Feminist Art Education at the Los Angeles Woman’S Building

Feminist Art Education at the Los Angeles Woman’S Building

EDUCATION AT THE WOMAN’S BUILDING

Betty Ann Brown

“The women’s art movement of Southern California undertook the creation of feminist education as a high priority . . . . The emphasis on edu cation distinguishes the West Coast women’s art movement from that in New York, for example, which focuses more on the needs of professional to advance their careers . . . . ” –Faith Wildin g 1

Feminism is one of the great movements for human liberation. The “second wave” of in the began in the sixties alongside the Civil Rights Movement and other broad-based initiatives that challenged the authority of the dominant cul - ture. Much of the political action of the decade was sited on university campuses, and the decade changed the face of the academy. (I remember participating in a 1968 sit-in at my college president’s office to compel him to institute a Black Studies Program.) In line with the call for egalitarianism (including race, class, and gender), adult education and community re-education were also carried out in community institutions throughout the country. Feminist educators were among the leaders of liberatory edu - cation, and feminist artists and historians were prominent among them. The Los Angeles Woman’s Building and the Feminist Studio Workshop were among the van - guard in feminist art education.

Cheryl Swannack spray ceiling, construction 141 of the new space on Spring Street , 1975. Woman’s Building Image Archive, Otis College of Art and Design. From Site to Vision: the Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture Brown Feminist Art Education at the Los Angeles Woman’s Building

The first Women’s Studies course was offered in the United States in 1966. 2 California” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. People crowded around Within seven years, there were more than two thousand Women’s Studies classes the videotapes of ’s early work, and some of the viewers’ comments were truly taught at various U.S. institutions. 3 By 1970, art historian Linda Nochlin was offering vitriolic. It was the only site in the immense and varied exhibition that brought forth courses on women in the arts in New York. 4 That same year, artist organ - such viewer hostility.) ized the (FAP) at California State University, Fresno. 5 It was the According to Chicago, the “most powerful work” of the year in Fresno was the first program of its kind. 6 work. 14 This led her to conclude that one reason so few women In her autobiography, Through the : My Struggle as a Woman Artist , excelled in traditional art educational contexts is that the curricula focused on histori - Chicago recalled that she and the (male) department chair at Fresno discussed that cally valued media—primarily painting and —which were precisely the media while many young women took art classes, few became professional artists. 7 Chicago that men dominated. It is important to note that in 1974, almost two-thirds of students decided to offer an all-woman class. Using her own experience as a model, she focused trained in art and art history in the United States were women, but only 2 1% of the fac - on “the struggle out of role conditioning that a woman would have to make if she ulty members were female. 15 When I joined the faculty of the art department of Cali- were to realize herself.” 8 Chicago had the class meet off campus because she had fornia State University, Northridge, in 1975, there was only one full-time art studio “ample demonstrations” of how intimidated many young women are in the presence of professor who was female. Even in 1999, when we hired two women as studio faculty men . . . [the male] presence reminded the women of society’s tacit and all-pervasive members, several of the men questioned the women’s technical competence. One man instruction that they should not be too aggressive, so that the men’s egos would not be went so far as to suggest that we needed to bring in a male mentor for one of the new threatened. ”9 She told the women that the first step was to locate and prepare a studio female faculty members because she probably could not handle the classes on her own. for the class meetings. As the students were compelled to develop practical skills in Such a suggestion was never made for new male hires. However, with the rise of artistic construction and the use of power tools, their physical self-confidence grew. pluralism in the late seventies and the emergence of new media like performance, video During the first class meetings, Chicago and the students began what the artist and installation, women artists began to find their creative voices in visual languages referred to as “a kind of modified consciousness-raising, which combined the ex- previously unheard by the art establishment. Today, women continue to be the majority pressing of common experiences with . . . trying to help the women understand the in art classes and the minority on studio faculties, but the ratios are changing. Chicago implications of those experiences in order to change their behavior patterns.” 10 summarized the success of her early efforts in Fresno: Chicago believed that consciousness-raising could “revolutionize teaching . . . because [as] one goes ‘around the circle,’ one discovers that the strangest people know the Once I had organized the class, taken it away from the school, given ‘right’ answer.” 11 myself and the students a space of our own and a support group, pro - In the second semester of the Fresno Program, Chicago added a research vided them with a positive role model and an environment in which component to the class. The students began to investigate women artists of the past, in we could be ourselves, growth for all of us was inevitable . . . . This sug - order to rediscover their “hidden heritage,” and they started an archive. The archive gests that what I stumbled on in Fresno has implications for all areas grew into the first West Coast file on women artists’ work .12 of female education. 16 Chicago encouraged the students to make art out of their personal experi - ences, rather than solely out of formal issues—form, line, texture and colo r—that had Indeed it does. little to do with their daily lives. They began to create art about shared female experi - ences—for example, the sensation of having their personal space violated by a man. It was like being at the moment of birth, the birth of a new kind of Chicago recalled that the students began “showing images of feelings and experiences community of women, a new kind of art made by women. 17 that none of us had ever seen portrayed before; and drawings, poems, per - formances, and ideas for films, all revealing the way women saw men . . . The images Chicago invited , a well-known New York painter, to speak at Fresno. that day came out with an incredible force, as if they had been bottled up and sud- Excited by the program Chicago had established, Schapiro convinced her husband, denly released. They were so powerful that they frightened me. ”13 (Early feminist art Paul Brach, who was then dean at California Institute of the Arts (Ca lArt s), to institute images remain powerful; they continue to frighten. Perhaps that is why they elicit such a similar structure there, where Chicago and Schapiro could teach together. In fall 1971, heated responses from so much of the public. In January 2001, I toured the “Made in Chicago and her new collaborator moved the Fresno Program to Ca lArts , which is

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located in Valencia just north of Los Angeles. 18 Several of the Fresno students decided to continue their art education at CalArts. Together with their teachers, they founded the Feminist Art Program ( FAP), endeavoring “to establish an alternative context in which one did not have to choose between ‘being a woman and being an artist.’ ”19 Chicago, Schapiro, and the Ca lArts students also organized the First West Coast Con- ference of Women Artists, which took place from January 21 to 23, 1972. 20 In order to learn about the history of feminist art education, I augmented my library research with telephone interviews of several of the women involved. I spoke with Los Angeles artists Cheri Gaulke, Robin Mitchell, and Linda Vallejo in November and December 2000. Information from the interviews appears below and throughout this essay.

In early 1971, while she was an art student in Southern California, Robin Mitchell heard a radio interview with Judy Chicago. Robin’s art education experience up to that point had been overwhelming dom - inated by male teachers. She remembers one professor commenting, “I don’t really like teaching girls; they just grow up and get married. So I’m going to teach the guys. I hope you don’t mind.” Another blithely said, “Art schools are the hunting grounds for mistresses Judy Chicago: A Survey of Four Decades of Art Making , National Museum of Women in the Arts, and second wives.” And Robin still has a photograph that one of her Washington, D.C., 2002. Installation view. Photograph by Donald Woodman. © Donald Woodman. fellow students took of the all-male faculty. An image of eight beard - ed men similarly attired in denim shirts, jeans, and cowboy boots, the photo is titled, “How to become an artist by imitating your teacher.” was to line every surface in the room with quilted fabric, but she soon realized that hers was an overly ambitious plan: she simply didn’t have When Robin heard Judy Chicago talking about the Fresno Program, the time. So instead, she covered every surface with abstract painting. she was impressed. She wrote Chicago a letter and received an invi - One viewer later commented that Robin had created “the artist’s tation to Fresno in response. Robin drove her Volkswagen van to room,” which was a gratifying response for the young painter. Fresno in 1971. She recalls meeting Chicago and Schapiro, seeing a slide show of the work of women artists, and being “blown away” by As with many of the other students, Robin was flabbergasted by the Schapiro’s abstract paintings. Robin entered Ca lArts that fall and huge public response and disconcerted by the glare of the public enrolled in the Feminist Art Program. She considers her first semes - spotlight on . The experience had been so raw and ter there “very valuable . . . a haven.” She learned about feminist theory, experimental; there had been so many difficult hours of crying and practiced consciousness-raising, and explored new artistic genres. fighting that it was unnerving to see strangers in “her” space. She also remains conflicted about Chicago and Schapiro as teachers and The second semester was largely consumed by Womanhouse [in which role models. Although she gratefully acknowledges that they changed artists created installations about women’s experience throughout a her life and greatly contributed to making her the artist and teacher seventeen-room mansion in Hollywoo d]. 21 Robin learned about and she is today, she found both women difficult and overly demanding at began to produce performance and installation in Womanhouse , times. Neither the Ca lArts FAP nor Womanhouse was an easy experi - where both genres evolved out of Chicago’s innovative teaching tech - ence for the young student. 22 niques. Robin worked in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Her first plan

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Womanhouse opened January 30, 1972. Conceived of as a large-scale art proj - Levrant de Bretteville founded the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW ) in Los Angeles. ect in which women took their societally imbedded but culturally demeaned home - The FSW was later incorporated into the Los Angeles Woman’s Building, which opened making activities and “carried them to fantasy propositions,” 23 Womanhouse was lo- in November 1973 on South Grandview Street, at the site of the old Chouinard Art cated in a condemned mansion near downtown Los Angeles. Chicago, Schapiro, and Institute. In 1975, the Woman’s Building moved to a new location, on Spring Street, in twenty-one students spent three months cleaning and repairing the long-vacant downtown Los Angeles. The FSW continued to thrive in the new location. house. As they worked, many of the students began to resent their teachers. The stu - dents became angry about the power wielded by Chicago and Schapiro, irritated by Cheri Gaulke came to the Feminist Studio Workshop ( FSW ) of the their belief that the two professional artists had more authority than they. Although Los Angeles Woman’s Building in fall of 1975. Cheri’s original inten - deeply concerned at first, Chicago came to understand that the only female authority tion was to spend a year in Los Angeles, acquire the skills necessary figures many of the students had seen were their mothers, and they had many unre - to develop a Woman’s Building program, then return to Minneapolis solved feelings about their mothers. Chicago realized that the rhetoric of the feminist and recreate the institution there. Her class was the first at the Spring movement suggested that all women should be equal, but that she and Schapiro, as Street location; they spent the entire fall semester (September– accomplished professional artists, were not precisely equal to the young art students. December 197 5) renovating the facility. Although Cheri understood Instead, they were “authorities in that situation.” 24 Chicago further realized that “ [t]he that one of the tenets of alternative feminist education was that acceptance of women as authority figures or as role models is an important step in students had to build their own space, that such construction was in female education. If one sees a woman who has achieved, one can say: I’m like her. If itself a significant learning experience, other women in the FSW she can do it, so can I. It is this process of identification, respect and then self-respect program were resentful. After all, they had traveled to Los Angeles that promotes growth.” 25 and invested considerable moneys . . . to do what? Clean floors and (I have often found it difficult to deal with female students who resent my windows? Build walls? Learn electrical and plumbing skills? authority position in the classroom because they, however unconsciously, project their mothers onto me. For example, I was a visiting professor at Claremont Graduate School In addition to renovating the site, the FSW students also had to cre - in the early 1990s. At the end of my two years there, I gave a seminar on feminist ate art for the exhibition planned for the Woman’s Building’s theory. Most of the women who enrolled in the seminar had already taken at least one December opening. Cheri and four others created a performance class with me, but few had concentrated on feminist theory. We began each class meet - piece that parodied a three-ring circus. Their “The Other Side Show” ing with consciousness-raising, then discussed feminist texts and their relationship to explored the collisions of public self and private self. Cheri, for art making. We ended the semester by creating a collaborative art exhibition that we example, closed herself into a circus box and appeared to be sawed in installed in the gallery of my home university, California State University, Northridge. half as a metaphor for her internal conflicts. Most of us bonded so deeply that we remain friends; I share an office with a woman who was one of the students in that seminar and am godmother to another former student’s During her two years at the FSW , Cheri’s primary mentors were daughter. However, some of the students resented me deeply and continually sought to performance artist , graphic designer Sheila de undermine the process. One young woman went so far as to telephone me at home early Bretteville, and art historian Ruth Iskin, whom Cheri credits with one weekend morning and yell at me about what she perceived as my preferential treat - “up-leveling” Cheri’s level of professionalism. Iskin’s advice was ment of some of her classmates. The intensity of her voice and her heightened emo - particularly cogent while Cheri worked on curating an exhibition of tionality reminded me of the wounded voice of sibling rivalry. I realized she could only Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village in 1976. (Grandma Prisbrey was an see me as a mother figure, never as a professional whose job was to guide her in deep - extraordinary, self-trained artist who created an entire village out of ening her awareness of the art process through examination of critical theory. bottles, cement, and other refuse in Simi Valley, to the northwest of Chicago’s accounts of her similar difficulties at Ca lArts helped me understand that the downtown Los Angeles.) Iskin also helped Cheri give herself “per - female authority figure is often a target, even for students of feminist art education). mission” to do individually generated art works, rather than solely In 1973, Chicago, art historian , and graphic designer Sheila pieces developed with groups of performers.

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to theorize, to extrapolate from the personal to the political. Cheri also remembers that de Bretteville was the first person to raise the FSW students’ awareness of the power of the media. De Bretteville exposed the aggressive nature of most mainstream advertising and asserted that there could be a gentler tenor to public communication. De Bretteville also helped Cheri see that she could use public venues, like the mail system and bus stops, to create art, like postcards and billboards, that integrated the personal and political.

Cheri was soon to become an FSW teacher herself, as a member of the Feminist Art Workers. Like many of the women educated at the Woman’s Building, she began as student then moved into roles of increasing responsibility. She offered various classes at the Woman’s Building, eventually became building manager, and continues to serve on the board of directors. 26

In 1976, the Woman’s Building Extension Program began offering art education classes for students who attended part-time, rather than full-time in the FSW . By the late seventies, feminist art education had become a significant academic concern. Georgia Collins wrote “the first article in art education grounded in feminist theory” in 197 7; a year later Renée Sandell finished her dissertation on the topic. 27 At that time, the Grandma Prisbrey at the opening of Bottle Village at the Woman’s Building , March 1976. Photograph by Woman’s Building’s classes were attracting a wide and diverse population. Sheila Ruth. Woman’s Building Image Archive, Otis College of Art and Design. In 1978, the FSW faculty turned teaching and administrative responsibilities over to the Feminist Art Workers (FAW), a group of former FSW students including Gaulke, as well as , Vanalyne Green, and Laurel Klick. Chicago was con - sumed by her work on . De Bretteville and Raven continued offering classes, although Raven was most absorbed by her work with the . When Cheri began classes at the Woman’s Building, she was enrolled The FSW closed in 1981, but the extension program classes continued. At that in Goddard College, an alternative academic program that gave credit time, the extension program was renamed the Woman’s Building Educational Program for off-site education. In 1977, she completed her master’s degree in (EP). The EP began by offering classes in the fields of visual arts, performance art, Feminist Art and Education through her two years of work at the FSW . graphics, book arts, video and writing. In the eighties, there was a shift toward profes - sional development, i.e., how to succeed as an artist; commissioned artworks, such as For Cheri, the three primary tenets of FSW that distinguished it from the Gilding the Building project, which invited local artists to create for the her previous educational experiences were the use of consciousness- facade of the Spring Street edifice; and funded projects for specific populations. raising, the emphasis on collaboration, and the focus on creating art out of each woman’s personal experiences. She remembers that Linda Vallejo came to the Woman’s Building to oversee the funded although there were as many as fifty women enrolled in the program project known as Madre Tierra Press in 1979. Through Madre Tierra, in the mid-seventies, they still took the time to sit in a circle and go Linda brought together thirteen Chicanas and taught them how to around the group, allowing each person to speak to a chosen theme. design and create handmade books. The goal was a series of image They often went around the circle a second time before they began and text volumes employing depictions of the Chicano community

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and women’s relation to it. Linda facilitated the collaborative genesis of images and texts. Then she oversaw the plate design, transfer of photographic images to the metal plates, use of letterpress, schedul - ing and printing of the final plates. Among the participants was Yreina Cervantes, who went on to expand her career through the use of the kind of art developed in the program.

Linda remembers that it was during her time with the Madre Tierra Press project that she was invited by the Woman’s Building to give lectures on Chicana art in general and her own art in particular. It was the first time she had done such public lectures. She recalls with gratitude that the Woman’s Building staff and participants were remarkably supportive as she planned and delivered the talks.

Linda, whose own artwork was featured in several exhibitions at the Woman’s Building and who served on the board of directors for sev - eral years, went on to become a prominent artist and community activist, as well as a notable spokesperson for Chicana arts. 28

In spite of its notable successes and considerable contributions to feminist art educa - tion, the Los Angeles Woman’s Building closed in 1991. The last EP classes were of- fered in spring of that year. The Woman’s Building Board of Directors remains active; the Woman’s Building papers are collected at the at the Smithsonian Institute, in Washington, D.C.; the collection of Woman’s Building slides, which were digitized by Otis College of Art and Design with assistance from the Getty Foundation, are housed at Otis; and these essays have been compiled into a book. In the nineties, the Woman’s Building Board initiated an oral history project to document the history of the institution. As of the publication of this book, the oral history project is still underway.

Principles of Feminist Art Education

Urging all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions, I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—movements against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement that makes education the practice of freedom. –bell hook s29

Linda Vallejo presenting an opening prayer for the Madre Tierra Press Opening Reception , 1982. © Linda Vallejo 2011. From Site to Vision: the Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture Brown Feminist Art Education at the Los Angeles Woman’s Building

The principles of feminist art education were drawn from the revolutionary which teachers deposit data into student “accounts,” then seek to withdraw it through practices of “second-wave” feminism and served to broaden the impact of feminism testing. “Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes in traditional and non-traditional educational contexts. Ultimately such principles deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.” 33 Perhaps functioned as vehicles for expanding the influence of feminism on the culture at large. because I am less economically oriented than Freire, I have always used the preacher/ congregation analogy to describe traditional education. The teacher/preacher—often In 1977, listed four principles of feminist art education: an older white male, who often wears a suit—stands at the front of the classroom, often 1. Consciousness-raising separated from the students/congregation by a podium. He delivers what he presents 2. Building a female context and environment as “Objective Truth” as if he were channeling God’s Word. The student s/congregation 3. Female role models are to receive the Word without question and repeat it back in the call/response of 4. Permission to be themselves and encouragement to make art out of examinations. their own experience as wome n30 Jane Tompkins asserts that the banking model is obsolete for most educators today, “but what we do have is something no less coercive, no less destructive of cre - Later Wilding added: ativity and self-motivated learning.” 34 That is what Tompkins calls the performance 5. Collaborative and collective work model, wherein teachers endeavor to demonstrate how smart, knowledgeable, and well 6. Exploding the hierarchies of materials and hig h/low art practices, prepared they are. Many teachers, she argues, put on performances whose true goal is as well as recovering the positive values of denigrated or margin- not to help the students learn, but to show them “how to perform within an institution - alized practice s31 al academic setting in such a way that they will be thought highly of by their colleagues and instructors .” 35 Like the banking and preacher /congregation models, Tompkins’s Peg Speirs introduced her 1998 study of feminist art education (FAE) with the follow - performance model can be described as a kind of separated learning. But separated ing paragraph: learning is not the feminist ideal.

FAE collapses the distinctions between research, art and pedagogy, Imagine knowing as an act of love . . . a giving of the self to the subject offering multiple paths of approach and application of feminist the - matter, rather than an “objective” standing at a distance. ory in some form of action. In the academy, FAE dissolves discipli - –Hilde Hein e 36 nary borders that serve to perpetuate separation, competition, and isolation to protect disciplinarity. Not to be understood as a new Jill Tarule describes the differences between separated and connected learning .37 discipline replacing existing disciplines, FAE is an interdisciplinary Separated learning is based on what Tarule calls the “doubting game.” It separates the location that remains in continual motion so that it cannot be fixed learner from the delivered information, at the same time insisting that argument is to one particular place, methodology, or feminist. FAE exists inside essential to learning. In other words, separated learning is fundamentally competitive and outside the academy simultaneously as feminists working for and contentious. In contrast, connected learning is based on the “believing game.” social change in different venues. FAE’s shifting location multiplies Connected learning asks questions like, “How is this experienced?” “What does it make its dimensions and expands its field of knowledge and practice to you think?” “How does it make you feel?” Connected learning attempts to include the reach diverse audiences for the purpose of social change. 32 knower in that which is known. It seeks to establish relationship, to value understand - ing and acceptance. Tarule and her coauthors build on the work of Carol Gilligan and For the principles of feminist art education to be incorporated into widespread edu- her colleague Nona Lyons, who “use the terms separate and connected to describe two cational practices requires a radical shift in the traditional educational paradigm. different conceptions or experiences of the self, as essentially autonomous (separate Challenges to that paradigm are by no means new, nor are they limited to feminist from others) or as essentially in relationship (connected to others) .” 38 practitioners. Brazilian liberationist Paulo Freire sought to expose and disrupt the Tarule notes that many scholars assert that female identity is defined in a master/servant hierarchy he witnessed in the traditional classroom in his widely in- woman’s capacity for relationship; by extension, the very act of learning itself can be fluential Pedagogy of the Oppressed . Freire critiques the banking model of education in embedded into relationship. She adds that connected learning may be gender related,

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but not gender specific. Like Judy Chicago’s Fresno Program and Ca lArts ’ FAP, the fem - to struggle. Critical pedagogies of liberation respond to those inist education at the Los Angeles Woman’s Building was based on connected learning. concerns and necessarily embrace experience, confessions and bell hooks argues that when we reject the separate learning paradigm, educa - testimony as relevant ways of knowing, as important, vital dimen - tion can become the practice of freedom. Like Tompkins, hooks notes that teaching is sions of any learning process .43 “a performative act.” But hooks argues that teachers “are not performers in the tradi - tional sense of the word in that our work is not meant to be a spectacle.” She sees the 3. Teachers can incorporate many and varied role models. 44 Again, performative aspect of teaching as precisely that which “offers the space for change, according to hooks: invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique ele - ments of each classroom . . . it is meant to serve as a catalyst that calls everyone to Multiculturalism compels educators to recognize the narrow become more and more engaged, to become active participants in learning. ”39 boundaries that have shaped the way knowledge is shared in the Particularly the performance art aspect of early feminist art education provided such a classroom . . . . When we, as educators, allow our pedagogy to be space for change and engagement. Feminist scholars such as hooks and Tarule build radically changed by our recognition of a multicultural world, on the principles of feminist art education developed at the Los Angeles Woman’s we can give students the education they desire and deserve. We Building in order to develop connected teachin g/ learning praxes and develop student can teach in ways that transform the consciousness, creating a understanding. As Belenky et al. write, “Understanding involves intimacy and equality climate of free expression that is the essence of a truly liberatory between self and object, while knowledge . . . implies separation from the object and liberal arts education .45 mastery over it.” 40 Expanded for a more inclusive and broad-reaching student popula - tion than the all female, all artist environment of the FSW, Wilding’s six principles of 4. The teacher must acknowledge that she, too, is involved in the feminist education might be restated as follows: learning process; she must recognize that education is a cycle that moves from life to the classroom and back to life again. As hooks 1. Teachers can learn to listen—really listen—to the diverse voices of asserts, “The engaged voice [of the teacher] must never be fixed and their students. As hooks writes, “It has been my experience that one absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world way to build community in the classroom is to recognize the value of beyond itself. ”46 each individual voice . . . . To hear each other (the sound of different voices), to listen to one another, is an exercise in recognition. It also 5. Learning can involve collaboration and teamwork. According ensures that no student remains invisible in the classroom.” 41 to hooks, “Excitement [in the classroom] is generated through col - Supporting students in finding their voices can lead to the emergence lective effort. Seeing the classroom always as a communal place of what Belenky et al. term subjective knowing: “The move away from enhances the likelihood of collective effort in creating and sustaining silence and an externally oriented perspective on knowledge and a learning community.” 47 truth [to] a new conception of truth as personal, private, and subjec - tively known or intuited.” 42 This move facilitates connected learning. 6. Education can focus on dissolving the polarities of male/female, good/evil, culture/nature, maste r/servant, etc. These are precisely the 2. The curriculum can be shifted from Euro-centered, male canons polarities that Hélène Cixous dissects in her compelling “Sorties. ”48 to acknowledgment of the validity of many traditions, from authori - tarian paradigms of objective “truths” to recognition that many so- The challenging of this solidarity of logocentrism and phallo - called truths are in fact relative. hooks explains: centrism has today become insistent enough—the bringing to light of the fate which has been imposed upon woman, of Identity politics emerges out of the struggles of oppressed or ex- her burial—to threaten the stability of the masculine edifice ploited groups to have a standpoint on which to critique dom- which passed itself off as eternal-natural; by bringing forth inant structures, a position that gives purpose and meaning from the world of femininity reflections, hypotheses which

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are necessarily ruinous for the bastion which still holds the Cheri asserts that her own art production has been “totally influenced” by the authority . . . . What would become of logocentrism, of the great FSW, from her video installations focused on environmental concerns to those ex- philosophical systems, of world order in general if the rock ploring teen identity, from public art works like her 1994 Los Angeles Metro Rail upon which they founded their church were to crumble ?. . . commission to her first digital book and website .51 Then all the stories would have to be told differently, the future Linda Vallejo still offers classes in alternative contexts, at alternative institu - would be incalculable, the historical forces would, will, change tions. For fifteen years now, she has facilitated Native American-inspired “sweats” hands, bodies; another thinking as yet not thinkable will trans - at California prisons. She became involved with sweats while working with a Chicana form the functioning of all society. 49 women’s dance troupe that used Mesoamerican imagery as part of the Mobile Art Studios of the Los Angeles Barrio (Chicano neighborhood). The troupe was often Today, Robin Mitchell is a feminist art educator. She teaches painting and drawing at included in intertribal ceremonies. At one of these, Linda was asked by an Arizona the University of Southern California, Pasadena City College, and Santa Monica elder to assist in “pouring water” (i.e., facilitating the ritual) in local prisons. Soon, she College. She acknowledges that her time at the Ca lArts Feminist Art Program shaped began offering rituals for the women incarcerated at the California Rehabilitation her teaching. Because of her experience with consciousness-raising, she is always Center in the city of Norco. Linda’s rituals are multicultural and inclusive. They employ careful to let each student have a voice. She designs her classes for students to discover talk circles not unlike the FSW consciousness-raising process, as well as guided med - what art is, rather than dictating to them her preconceptions. She is aware that the itations for relaxation, several hours in the sweat lodge, and banquets honoring the student population has changed since the seventies, that it is much more diverse, and elders and teachers of the groups. Linda knows that such rituals have become and will she employs many of the insights she learned as a woman to develop her awareness of remain an integral part of her being. She is committed to teaching native wisdom, to multicultural issues. She credits the FAP with strategies for encouraging students to imaging women at the center of all things, and to aiding others in finding their spiritual have a voice, to express their opinions with confidence, and to value their personal core, the deep meaning in their lives. experiences. While she realizes that most of her students will not become professional Linda continues to appreciate the generous support she received from the Los artists, she encourages them to remain creative and to appreciate the value of art in Angeles Woman’s Building. “You don’t really know the mountain until you’ve started to everyone’s lives. climb,” she says. “You don’t know how high and how steep it really is. You imagine that Robin is troubled that many of her young female students have had little or no there will be several organizations to support you along the way, but the truth is, there exposure to feminism. She is concerned about all the negative stereotypes about femi - aren’t.” As she continues to “pour water” in prisons, she remembers the collaborative nism she encounters. She is also concerned about the way in which many [male] artists community context of her classes at the Woman’s Building. On the eve of several one- have usurped feminist art images and processes without giving credit to their origins. person shows, Linda acknowledges that it was the Los Angeles Woman’s Building that Robin finds the contemporary art world as sexist, ageist, and racist—and as gave her some of her first exhibition opportunities and provided the nurturing com - narrow as it has ever been. She admits that it took a long time for her to realize that she munity necessary for the germination of her successful career .52 was editing her work in a male way in order to be taken seriously. Once she realized Although neither the Los Angeles Woman’s Building nor the Feminist Studio that, she discovered a new freedom in her art making. She now paints and draws and Workshop is still functioning, the innovative education they produced continues to sculpts passionate, energetic, “hot” abstractions that are widely exhibited and the sub - influence and inspire. That influence can be seen in both the innovative teaching of ject of substantial critical acclaim .50 former Woman’s Buildin g/FSW students and in the thousands they have instructed. Like Robin, Cheri Gaulke is a professional feminist educator. She teaches art As the influence continues throughout many generations of students, the practice of at Harvard-Westlake School, a private institution in Los Angeles that has approximately feminist education expands its transformative impact on the culture. 750 students at their grades 10–12 campus. Cheri specializes in video classes; teaching video is a skill she learned at the FSW. She believes that Sheila de Bretteville’s com- mitment to giving a different voice to public communication still has a significant impact on her work as a teacher. De Bretteville’s influence is seen in Cheri’s policy that students must respect and listen to each other, her projects have students create art from their personal experiences, and her emphasis on media literacy /critical thinking.

156 157 From Site to Vision: the Woman’s Building in Contemporary Culture Brown Feminist Art Education at the Los Angeles Woman’s Building

Notes 32. Speirs, iii. 1. Faith Wilding, By Our Own Hands: The Women’s Artist’s Movement, Southern California 1970–1976 (Santa Monica, 33. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1982) quoted in Jane Tompkins, “Teaching CA : Double X, 197 7). Like It Matters: A Modest Proposal for Revolutionizing the Classroom,” Lingua Franca (August 1991): 24. 2. Barbara Ehrlich White, “A 1974 Perspective: Why Women’s Studies in Art and Art History?” in Art Journal 35.4 34. Tompkins, 24. (1976): 3 40. From a paper delivered to the College Art Association meetings, January 1974. 35. Ibid., 24 –25. Tompkins suggests that in place of the performance, teachers make the students responsible 3. Ibid., 3 40. for presenting the material to the class for most of the semester. I have found this a particularly effective strategy in graduate level classes. In my experience, however, making students in introductory classes responsible for 4. Ibid., 3 40. material they have had little or no previous contact with is inappropriate. I find I must spend some time helping 5. At the time, the institution was known as Fresno State University. them assemble the “raw materials” of information and a “tool box” of theorie s/strategies before they are 6. See Renée Sandell, “Feminist Art Education: An Analysis of the Women’s Art Movement as an Educational equipped to present material on their own. Force,” in Studies in Art Education 20 (2) (1979): 1 8– 28. Cited in Peg Speirs, “Collapsing Distinctions: Feminist 36. Hilde Heine, quoted in Estella Lauter, Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Art Education as Research, Art and Pedagogy” (PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1998), 5. Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 221. 7. Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1975), 70. 37. Jill Mattuck Tarule, from “Women’s Ways of Knowing,” paper delivered at Women and Education: Learning, 8. Ibid., 71. Knowing and Teaching for the 21st Century, a conference held at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, in January 1990. Tarule’s theories are amplified in Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule 9. Ibid., 72. Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New 10. Ibid., 75. York: Basic Books, 1986/199 7), especially 10 0–30. 11. Ibid., 77. 38. Belenky, Clichy, Goldberger and Tarule, 102. 12. Ibid., 86. 39. hooks, 11. 13. Ibid., 79-80. 40. Belenky, Clichy, Goldberger and Tarule, 101. 14. Ibid., 87. 41. hooks, 40–41. 15. White, 340. 42. Belenky, Clichy, Goldberger and Tarule, 54. 16. Chicago, 78. 43. hooks, 88–89. 17. Ibid., 90. 44. Teachers must take care not to reproduce stereotypes about oppressed peoples as they work with different cultures. I point to the work of Leilani Clark, Sheridan DeWolf, and Carl Clark (Euro-American scholars at 18. The feminist art curriculum at CalArts ended in 1975, when artist-professors Sherry Brody and Miriam Grossmont College in El Cajon, Californi a) whose article “Teaching Teachers to Avoid Having Culturally Schapiro left the institution. Assaultive Classrooms,” in Young Children (July 199 2): 4–6, made me particularly aware of this danger. I also 19. Chicago, 100. refer readers to Maria Lugones’s “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception,” in Ann Garry and 20. See Wilding, By Our Own Hands , 31. Marilyn Pearsall, Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy (: Unwin Hyman, 198 9), for discussion of how the disenfranchised “learn” negative self-image. 21. Womanhouse was an installation created by Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and their students in the Feminist Art Program at CalArts, in 1972. 45. hooks, 44. 22. Author’s telephone interview with Robin Mitchell, 2000. 46. Ibid.,11. 23. Chicago, 104. 47. Ibid., 8. 24. Ibid., 108. 48. Hélène Cixous, “Sorties,” in New French , Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. (New York: Schocken Books, 198 0), 9 0–98. 25. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 9 2–93. 26. Author’s telephone interview with Cheri Gaulke, 2000. 50. Author’s telephone interview with Robin Mitchell, 2000. 27. See Speirs, 3–5. 51. Author’s telephone interview with Cheri Gaulke, 2000. 28. Author’s telephone interview with Linda Vallejo, 2000. 52. Author’s telephone interview with Linda Vallejo, 2000. 29. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 12. 30. Wilding, By Our Own Hands , 10–11. 31. Faith Wilding, “The Feminist Art Programs at Fresno and CalArts, 1970–75,” in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 34.

158 159 Estilita Gramaldo (far left) of WomanTours talking to Suzanne Shelton (center) in courtyard of the Woman’s Building at the Feminist Eye Film and Video Conference , March 29-30, 1975. Woman’s Building Image Archive, Otis College of Art and Design.

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